While viewing text, human language characters, images, hyperlinks, and/or other content on an electronic display, users sometimes wish to obtain further information about a certain portion of the content. For example, a user may wish to obtain a definition or a translation of a word that is displayed. As another example, a user may wish to obtain an explanation of a language character, such as an Asian language character that is not used very frequently.
Some applications allow a user to move a mouse pointer over a displayed word and wait for a predetermined period, after which a dictionary search is performed on the displayed word. Such applications generally perform a search anytime the mouse pointer is stationary for the predetermined period, even if the user does not desire a search on the word that the mouse pointer happens to be stationary over. This may use computing resources unnecessarily. Similarly, some applications allow a user to hold a hotkey and click on a displayed word. Such applications require coordination between the keyboard and the mouse, which may take the user's eyes off of the display to coordinate the selection operation.